Aristotle

Aristotle

Aristotle.

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Aristotle was born in 384 b.c., in Stagira, Greece. He achieved prominence as an eminent philosopher who greatly influenced the basic principles of philosophy and whose ideologies are still practiced today.

Aristotle was a student of the renowned philosopher Plato and tutored Alexander the Great, who became King of Macedonia in 336 b.c.

Aristotle established his own school in the Lyceum, near Athens, in 335 b.c. He often lectured his students in the portico, or walking place, of the Lyceum. The school was subsequently called Peripatetic, after the Greek word peripatos for "walking place."

In 323 b.c. the reign of Alexander ended with his death, and Aristotle sought refuge at Chalcis.

Aristotle formulated numerous beliefs about the reasoning power of humans and the essence of being. He stressed the importance of nature and instructed his pupils to closely study natural phenomena. When teaching science, he believed that all ideas must be supported by explanations based upon facts.

Concerning the realm of politics, Aristotle propounded that humans are inherently political and demonstrate an essential part of their humanity when participating in civic affairs.

Philosophy was a subject of great interest to Aristotle, and he theorized that philosophy was the foundation of the ability to understand the basic axioms that comprise knowledge. In order to study and question completely, Aristotle viewed logic as the basic means of reasoning. To think logically, one had to apply the syllogism, which was a form of thought comprised of two premises that led to a conclusion; Aristotle taught that this form can be applied to all logical reasoning.

"Man is by nature a political animal."—Aristotle

To understand reality, Aristotle theorized that it must be categorized as substance, quality, quantity, relation, determination in time and space, action, passion or passivity, position, and condition. To know and understand the reality of an object required an explanation of its material cause, which is why it exists or its composition; its formal cause, or its design; its efficient cause, or its creator; and its final cause, or its reason for being.

Aristotle agreed with his mentor, Plato, concerning the field of ethics. The goodness of a being depended upon the extent to which that being achieved its highest potential. For humans, the ultimate good is the continual use and development of their reasoning powers to fullest capacity. To effect fulfillment and contentment, humans must follow a life of contemplation, rather than pleasure.

The fundamental source of Aristotle's theories were his lectures to his students, which were compiled into several volumes. They include Organum, which discusses logic; Physics; Metaphysics; De Anima, concerning the soul; Rhetoric; Politics; Nichomachean Ethics and Eudemian Ethics, involving principles of conduct; and De Poetica, or poetics.

He also wrote Constitution of Athens, a description of the foundations of the government of Athens. The work was discovered in the late nineteenth century.

In Tragedies, (the goodliest Argument of all, and for the vse, either of a learned preacher, or a Ciuill Ientleman, more profitable than Homer, Pindar, Virgill, and Horace: yea comparable in myne opinion, with the doctrine of Aristotle, Plato, and Xenophon,) the Grecians, Sophocles and Euripides far ouer match our Seneca in Latin.

With respect to The Arcadia, the crucial difference between republican and princely politics concerns the relation between law and equity, a debate that goes back (as most debates do) to Plato and Aristotle.

Aristotle, in the Rhetoric, appears to claim both that emotion-arousal has no place in the essential core of rhetorical expertise and that it has an extremely important place as one of three technical kinds of proof.

To be sure, Descartes may well be taking advantage of a practice of Aristotle cited by Suarez wherein the Stagirite would sometimes characterize a form that is less perfect in comparison to its contrary form as a privation, such as blackness in comparison to whiteness.

The third thesis is especially controversial because it challenges a widely shared view that the concept of rights is a modern discovery (or innovation) which is altogether alien to the thought of Aristotle and of classical writers and thinkers generally.

She argues, though, that the dialogue with Socrates implicitly begins in NE II, where Aristotle anticipates rejecting the upcoming Socratic view by maintaining a split between the rational and non-rational parts of the human soul.

75) This claim, it should be noted, does not imply absolutist or imperialist propensities; rather, from antiquity through the Renaissance, constitutional theorists, whether royalist or republican - Aristotle, Polybius, Aquinas, Hooker, Buchanan, Languet - see the rule of law as the key feature distinguishing legitimate government from despotism because law protects the weak from what one Elizabethan denominated "Irish rule": namely "a government as the mightiest do what they list against the inferiors.

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